Born in 1966 in Boston, Massachusetts, Elizabeth McCracken grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, earned a B.A. and M.A. in English from Boston University, an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa, and an M.S. in Library Science from Drexel University. She is married to the novelist Edward Carey. They have a son and daughter. An earlier child died before birth, an experience that formed the basis of McCracken's memoir An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination.

Asked about her frequent combination of tragedy and humor, McCracken explained, “You write the way you think about the world. My motto in times of trouble—and I’m speaking of life, not writing—is no humor too black. I need humor much more than sympathy or philosophy. Humor reminds you, when you’re flattened by sorrow, that you’re still human.”

McCracken holds the James Michener Chair of Fiction of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. She and her husband were previously on the faculty of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Ann Patchett, in an interview for Blackbird at Virginia Commonwealth University, mentions that Elizabeth McCracken is her editor, and is the only person to read her manuscripts as she is writing them.

Elizabeth McCracken is the author of eight books: Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry, The Giant’s House, Niagara Falls All Over Again, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, Thunderstruck & Other Stories, Bowlaway, The Souvenir Museum, and The Hero of This Book. She’s received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Liguria Study Center, the American Academy in Berlin, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Thunderstruck & Other Stories won the 2015 Story Prize. Her work has been published in The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, The O. Henry Prize, The New York Times Magazine, and many other places.